(JWR) ---- (http://www.jewishworldreview.com)
WHEN THE MOMENT CAME and a frail-looking Elia Kazan walked up on
the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion last Sunday to receive his
honorary Oscar, it was almost anti-climactic.

An unsuspecting observer
would never have noticed anything out of the ordinary, except that some
people in the audience were conspicuously not applauding.

Kazan, the director of such classics as A Streetcar Named Desire,
On the Waterfront, and Splendor in the Grass, "named names" before the
House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952, denouncing friends who had
been in the Communist Party with him. This caused his nomination for a
lifetime achievement award to be rejected by the American Film Institute in
1989 and by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association in 1996. Now, the
controversy over Kazan's Oscar has turned into one more round in the
never-ending debate over communism, anti-communism, and the American left.

During other recent skirmishes, usually occasioned by revelations
about Cold War-era Soviet espionage in the United States, left-of-center
commentators have mocked the right's insistence on keeping the Cold War
battles alive and clinging to its "mummified sentiments" about communism,
in the words of The Nation's Eric Alterman.

But the uproar over Kazan
makes it clear that the left is not prepared to let bygones be bygones,
either.

Kazan

Many angrily argued that Kazan was a traitor who didn't deserve to
be honored. Others demanded that he apologize for his actions, to which
Kazan's wife responded by suggesting that the left apologize for its
support of Stalinism. During the Academy Awards ceremony, about 300
anti-Kazan protesters gathered outside the pavilion -- along with a smaller
pro-Kazan rally organized by the Ayn Rand Institute, which hails Kazan as
an American patriot and a hero in the fight against communism.

The truth is probably far more complex. Kazan may have been
motivated in part by the desire to protect his own career. And the people
he named weren't especially dangerous. They were not Soviet spies with
access to U.S. military secrets but, as Salon magazine columnist Steve
Erickson put it, "hapless Hollywood nitwits" deluded about "the Stalinist
paradise."

Even the historians whom the left accuses of trying to whitewash
McCarthyism, such as Ronald Radosh and Harvey Klehr, stress that while Joe
McCarthy proved right about the extent of Soviet penetration of the U.S.
government and Soviet control of the American Communist Party, his tactics
-- and his demagoguery -- were wrong. The blacklists mostly targeted
people for their political beliefs, not for illegal activities, which in
itself was un-American.

(George Will argues that society, including the
film industry, had a right to ostracize people who sympathized with a
brutal regime intent on destroying democracy; but the government had no
right to enforce this ostracism.)

Kazan came to understand the murderous and repressive nature of
communism early on, though he remained a man of the left for many years
after that. It probably would have been far better if, instead of lending
legitimacy to HUAC, he had denounced both communism and the violations of
civil liberties that helped give anti-communism a bad name.

So the choice Kazan made was morally ambiguous. But the people who
clamor against him have made some pretty awful choices themselves. Many
were loyal to a dictatorship that killed more people than the Nazis and
squelched freedom just as ruthlessly --- so loyal they supported the purges
of leftists who didn't follow the party line. Many kept making
half-excuses for that regime even after its atrocities had been fully
exposed, defending the "noble" ideals on which it was based and insisting
on something of a moral equivalency between communism and Western
democracies.

It ill behooves those who have made mistakes of this caliber to
engage in moral posturing. A little humility might be called for. But
none is in evidence as leftists not only vilify Kazan but try to discredit,
using absurd logic (for instance, that Soviet operatives lied about their
recruitment successes in reports to superiors back home), the damning
disclosures about American Communists in the 1950s and about such left-wing
idols as the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss.